Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
Between Meals first appeared as a series in The New Yorker and was published as a book in 1962. A. J. Liebling, the magazine's longtime press critic and war correspondent, uses it to look back on the year he spent as a young man in Paris in the 1920s pretending to study at the Sorbonne while really learning how to eat. The book is built around the great meals of his youth, his mentor Yves Mirande, and the small bistros and bouillons that taught him what serious appetite looked like. Liebling writes with the leisurely confidence of a man who has done the work and now wants to remember it properly. Generations of food writers, including those who would publish in the era of glossy magazines and television, have treated this short book as a foundation text.
What you might want to know about Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A. J. Liebling looks back at his apprenticeship as an eater in 1920s Paris, when he was a student of food, wine, and the people who served them.
Bourdain treated Liebling as the gold standard for food writing and pointed to Between Meals as the book that proved you could write about appetite without ever turning it into a celebrity profile.
Not really. It is a memoir of how Liebling learned to eat, set in a Paris that no longer exists in quite that form.
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris was written by A. J. Liebling, published in 1962 by North Point Press.
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris is 192 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
